Hopefully this brief post can be helpful to someone. When I installed Visual Studio 2012 the first time, I wasn't sure which profile to select as the default type. What I saw was something similar this:
I selected something (I can't actually remember, now - probably General Development), but after using Visual Studio for a while I realized I didn't have many of the menu settings that my colleagues did. Important menu options were missing, such as Analyze, SQL, and Test. Looking online wasn't terribly helpful; I wasn't able to come up with a clear term to describe my issue. There wasn't any obvious way to access these "missing" features.
Short of reinstalling Visual Studio, I decided to wipe my profile & settings and see if that may help. Luckily, this solved my issue and I could see all of the menu items that I should have seen all along. Talk about frustrating!
At work, we’ve recently begun the transition to a new task management toolset. Since before I was brought aboard, the team has used JIRA for issue tracking and bug reporting. This is my first experience with JIRA - everything I’ve worked on up to this point utilized physical Scrum boards. The interface with JIRA is a bit overwhelming, and it took our team a considerable amount of time to figure out why one team member was receiving multiple emails every few seconds regarding open issues. Yikes!
A few months back we transitioned to a physical Kanban board for our day-to-day doings, and most recently we made the next logical step to a digital version, through Trello. I would always recommend a physical board over digital, but we lack a highly visible location for such a board for long-term work. JIRA has the means for tracking in-progress work, but overall, it felt very cumbersome. Trello’s interface and iOS/Android apps, on the other hand, instantly felt superior. I can easily make a board, set up some swim lanes, and get to business. I’ve read of others using it for personal organization (i.e. non-software development tasks, such as planning a garden, laying out housework, or sorting comics. Neat!). I’ve used it for breaking up tasks into bite-sized chunks. Note-cards or scrap paper may work just as well, but personally, I don’t feel that the software gets in the way so I'll continue to use it. I ran across an interesting thing the other day as I took a break to read a post by Joel Spolsky, talking about having a inventory of software:
Trello works great for a reasonable amount of inventory, but it intentionally starts to get klunky if you have too many cards in one list. And that’s exactly the point: it makes inventory visible so that you know when it’s starting to pile up. (read the rest here: Software Inventory)
If you’ve used Trello much, you know what he means. Those swim lanes fill up quickly, and it’s not super easy to dig down and drop or pick up a card at the bottom of the list. This is an interesting example of a tool shaping one's habits - the software doesn’t make it easy to use it in a way that the authors decided was inefficient. It almost forces you to think about how many tasks are in a given column. Another example of software shaping the worker comes in the task, bug, and estimate tool I alluded to my team transitioning to: FogBugz, which is developed by the same team who spawned Trello, Fog Creek Software. I won’t hash out what FogBugz is and isn’t, because honestly I don’t completely know yet, I’m still feeling it out. But one aspect of it that I have touched already is the estimation portion. FogBugz allows teams to set up milestones, create tasks, and provide estimates, all in the aim of creating mathematically-sound delivery dates. It becomes more accurate over time, and it has a lot of features packed into its dense interface. FogBugz helps shape developers when tasks get estimated: the first time the developer places an estimate, FogBugz saves that estimate as the “original” estimate, even if it was very wrong! I learned this the hard way. The software reminds you that your original estimate was inaccurate, it forces you to at least think about it. Now, you can hide individual columns, so you're not stuck staring at it for the next few months, but the first time you realize your first estimate sticks, you'll start being a bit more aware. At the very least, I'm now a little bit more aware of my own tendency to jump into things quickly, and I'll think twice about my estimate the next time I fill one in. Want more info on FogBugz's Event-based Scheduling? Check out this link!
bought a house and moved my pregnant wife and I in (with her help!)
presented my work's products at Infocomm 2012 in Las Vegas
welcomed my family's first child into the world --- a very beautiful, healthy girl!
recovered from oral surgery, spawned by the discovery of a benign tonsil growth (scary!)
2012 has been a whirlwind of life events for me and my family.
When my wife and I met with our pediatrician for the first time, she told us two things. You can't develop bad habits in the first 3 months, and the name of the game is survival. Her advice was directed toward raising a child, and I completely agree; sleep has been a scarce commodity. But this blog space is (mostly) focused on technical reflections.
Having started working full-time at a software company, I realized recently that my pediatrician's advice is pretty applicable to starting a career, especially in the software industry. "Survival" is one's goal, and keeping up with one's work is paramount. You have few habits, so don't worry about being a well-oiled machine quite yet. Get your bearings and learn every day: names of coworkers, the culture of the company, all the way down to how your fellow code-smiths build software. Sponge it all up, and if you get bogged down take notes!
As I gain more experience with some of the technologies I'm using, I'll try to backup my tips & lessons learned here. My current plan is to write a small Pomodoro application using MVVM and Test-Driven Development. For some reason, all of the Pomodoro Windows applications I've found are pretty minimal, and I'd like to add some features to them, such as a tracking log to see how well the user is sticking to following the Pomodoro schedule. It might be interesting to turn it into a game of sorts, similar to TDGotchi, but I'll work on getting a functional basic application first.
Until then, I'll keep on surviving.
(survival is really only present in the title of this song;
I just like the band and the song is kind of fun, if a bit cheesy :P )
